STABILISE

Disclaimer: It is important to note that STABILISE is a work in progress operated by an educated woman with lived experience with bipolar disorder and computer scientists interested in improving access to practical knowledge, medical professionals, and crisis responders. We are building a mobile application that is designed to track moods and analyse text so help can be provided sooner. For medical advice, please consult your family doctor or a trusted health care practitioner. If you believe you are in need of immediate medical assistance and live in North America, call 911. Otherwise, please reach out to the Lifeline at 988 (by phone or text).

Tag: depression

  • On Asking Hard Questions

    On Asking Hard Questions

    How much responsibility can be allocated to an AI chatbot for monitoring someone’s mental health?

    That’s a hard question — a tricky puzzle because it involves a few important factors.

    Let’s say someone is wondering if they are exhibiting signs of depression or mania. They could ask someone in their life to pay attention to their moods and behaviors, they could consult a medical professional, and they could monitor their own moods and behaviors.

    Self-monitoring is a crucial skill to learn.

    The first step is awareness.

    Do you know where you are?

    This is your breath, the part of you that anchors you to earth right now. Not the past, not the future, this moment, the one with features that can be measured.

    One of the reasons why writing is considered to be as therapeutic as it is is because it is a grounding exercise.

    It roots the person in the now, a blank page offering the space needed to express whatever it is the person wants to express.

    The benefit of an AI chatbot, especially one that is well-designed, is that it can serve as a sounding board for ideas, thoughts, and concepts. It can also pinpoint language that indicates professional help may be beneficial.

    Self-monitoring is a crucial skill to learn because the self-observation process ideally helps build recognition of recurring moods and patterns. It also encourages the person to adopt a wide variety of strategies designed to improve one’s mental health. The trick is to learn how to utilize each of them at optimal times.

    I speculate that learning what optimal times means is different for everyone. But on a surface level, it seems as though it would be helpful for people to have an alarm system of sorts. It’s one thing to write that you are feeling depressed, another to have an objective party state that you have expressed feelings of depression for the past three weeks, your steps count has decreased, your heart has not engaged in the same sort of activity for days, and you exhibit signs of social isolation.

    Does it seem disingenuous for personal data to be interpreted and presented by a machine?

    Hard questions, especially when AI hallucinates. The other day, it counted the number of words wrong. Not by a couple of digits, but a couple thousand.

    There is a need for diligence, streamlining, creating spaces for resources that maybe weren’t known before.

    It all becomes very important — the details, I mean.

  • On Tufts

    On Tufts

    I was able to move on from Chapter 6 of Randolph Nesse’s book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Near the end of Chapter 7, he writes,

    “Patients with depression feel like they are sinking on a small tuft, fearful, often for good reason, of taking that first step into the muck. Leaving a job or marriage with no place else to go can make things worse. Much of the work of therapy is to help people get up the courage to make changes and to help them see other little tufts of grass on the way to higher ground” (135).

    It may be the shifting of the seasons, but I can sense that some part of me is sinking on a small tuft.

    For me, depression is not an anvil on the chest or a cloud of darkness. It is the paralysis of inaction. It is participating in a team-building exercise directed towards acknowledging strengths and not being able to name a single one of mine.

    Nesse goes on to write,

    “Depression is caused by the situation, the view of the situation, and the brain. Treatment can change the situation, the view of the situation, and the brain. However, all three interact in tangled webs of causes, so addressing only one of them will miss many treatment possibilities” (136).

    While sinking on one tuft, it can be simple to narrow focus on the muck. How cold, drab, and gross! A significant part of cognitive restructuring involves being able to perceive a situation from different angles. Sure, this tuft here is sinking, but there is another tuft of grass there. One tuft to another forms rungs on a ladder until there’s stable ground.

    Sometimes the next tuft is gratitude. I mean, sometimes it’s the ability to look at the sky or breathe. Maybe that’s why breathwork is often cited as a useful tool. When there is nothing else, there is the capacity to fill one’s lungs.

    Release before expansion, expansion after release.

    One of my own personal obstacles is wanting to climb an entire mountain in a single swoop. While building STABILISE, our virtual journal and mood tracker, I have been encouraged to learn that small steps lead the way.

    Sure, there may be nicks and tears, but we are closer than we have ever been.

    A fascinating component of Nesse’s work is how often he stresses the depression that accompanies pursuing an “unreachable goal.” Writing the sample paper for grad school and building an application are not unreachable goals. What may be unreachable is thinking either could be done without faltering.

    Sometimes it really is about the moments where you’re stuck, where you’re convinced that you couldn’t possibly know what to do next. So, you read another page or two, you let your ideas simmer, and you make the decision to try again tomorrow.

  • On Loneliness

    On Loneliness

    In his book, A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt writes,

    “Let’s start with the body, for so much is won and lost and lost and lost there.

    I was lonely once and that was all it took. A thick haze, a smothering opacity, this was the loneliness of feeling estranged from one’s body and, by extension, the world.”

    It astounds me how certain books arrive at the right time.

    It can be easy to think that one is alone with their thoughts, but a distinctive part of becoming an integrated human being is realizing that the majority of us share the experience of loneliness.

    It is a profound feeling, one that reverberates through the body. It is a sacred calling for an honest answer, one that sets the brain ablaze in search of the questions that are being asked.

    Am I enough? Am I enough as I am? What does being enough mean?

    – Samples

    It is sacred work to attempt to discover the questions and answers for one’s self. I don’t believe there is a single response. Rather, I believe the answers fluctuate depending on the times in which the questions are being asked. The objective may be to recognize that truths echo through one’s frame in an intuitive form of knowing.

    The confusion is the desire that stems from loneliness or an equivocal feeling. Hence, the persistent emphasis on meditation and the powerful effects of grounding. To return to the earth is to return to the body. It is to gain the capacity to name loneliness without trying to eradicate it.

    Let the world be what it is. Let yourself be in the world as you are. Loneliness only seems to carry a stench when it leads you to sacrifice your morals and principles. Hence, the persistent emphasis on forming intentions and setting a schedule and learning the power of self-discipline.

    Control thyself — or learn how to pause before acting on an impulse. Act on the impulse anyway to learn the difference between doing and not doing.

    Reading Belcourt’s memoir reminds me how veracious we can be when we offer ourselves the time to examine why we do the things we do. You, dear reader, must be familiar with the sort of doing I am mentioning: the unmentionable acts, the times we contort our physical bodies into shapes beyond our comprehension and recognition, the willful negligence of self in the name of self-expansion. When the self is lonely, it is hard to see clearly.

    Loneliness, in and of itself, is not negative. It carves a space, one in which it is possible to interrogate what to do with the absence and the excess. Self-expansion can often look like self-destruction in the before.

  • On Shifting Paradigms

    Yesterday, I came across Thomas Szasz’s 1960 essay, The Myth of Mental Illness, which struck me as one of the most profound papers I have ever had the good fortune to read.

    In his essay, Szasz asks a profound question:

    Do you have a mental illness or do you have a problem with living?

    At the risk of sounding foolish, I had not considered that line of inquiry until I read his work.

    As I sift through Threads, I notice how many users are struggling with mental health concerns. One user went so far as to say that being diagnosed with a mental illness felt like the end of the world.

    I can relate.

    When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it felt as though I had been negated by its symptoms. Suddenly, my passion became mania and my sadness became depression. I felt labeled, misunderstood, and also a perverse sense of satisfaction that I could finally name what was happening in my mind.

    Reading Szasz’s essay reminds me that I have the freedom to shift my emotional and mental paradigms. He encourages me to think about how being diagnosed with a mental illness can cause the one who has received the diagnosis to form a mental and emotional construct defined by the DSM-V.

    This construct alone is reductive and simplistic.

    When he writes there are “stresses and strains inherent in the social intercourse of complex human personalities,” Szasz is elucidating on the concept that living among other human beings is hard. Maybe not is, but can be understood as such.

    Szasz goes on to write, “the concept of illness, whether bodily or mental, implies deviation from some clearly defined norm.” The question that follows: Who defines the norm?

    I don’t have any answers at the moment. I just appreciate how he presents fascinating questions that encourage continued thought and research.

  • On Building Stabilise

    In her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou writes,

    “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

    Years ago, I began to think about what I wanted my life to mean. By mean, I was searching for a purpose, a grand narrative that was ethical and forward-thinking. I was working at a flower shop at the time. Although it was soothing to be around beauty on a daily basis, I felt an internal lurch to alter the course of my life.

    At first, I wanted to build a physical safe space, a real place where people could feel free to be themselves. For that, I considered returning to school for an MA in Social Work or Psychology. I ended up studying Social Service Work at Seneca Polytechnic, an institution that was instrumental in teaching me how to approach myself and others better.

    I was mentally ill when I began my studies. There were clear symptoms of psychosis – voices in my mind and the belief that I was being tracked and monitored by governmental forces. Once, I threw out every identification document I had: birth certificate, passport, drivers license, and bank card. I was trying to prove to the voices in my mind that I was not going to run away from Canada, that I was strong enough to stay.

    It was startling for my mother, agonizing for me. It was only when I reached out to a highly esteemed university professor that I realized something was deeply wrong. He advised me to seek medical attention for the delusions and hallucinations I was experiencing. By calling them what they were, I was able to seek help. Attending Seneca was beneficial because they offered immediate access to a psychiatrist and social worker. I spoke with a female psychiatrist who diagnosed me with bipolar disorder and prescribed an antipsychotic medication. With time, the voices stopped and I was able to live a relatively normal life.

    While recovering, it occurred to me that I could build a digital safe space instead, an application where people are offered access to a mood tracking feature and interactive virtual journal. The reason why it is beneficial to include AI is because it can be designed to look out for warning signs (disorganized thinking, delusions, hallucinations, suicidal ideation, etc.). It also offers users a chance to speak openly and not be afraid of judgment in a private space. It is not meant to be a replacement for a medical professional, but a guide on when a user may benefit from seeking real professional resources.

    Stabilise is a passion project led by real individuals – experienced computer scientists and a woman who graduated with a BA Honours in Philosophy and a diploma with Honours in Social Service Work. We are not medical professionals, but we are people who care deeply about improving mental health and access to knowledge. I look forward to continuing my education, both academically and professionally. I also look forward to sharing my learning experience with all of you.